SnowCap Technologies is a proud contributor to The Home for Little Wanderers organization. In 2016, SnowCap started its journey with The Home by participating in the annual Adopt-A-Family Big Wishes Gift Drive and from there the partnership only grew. Every year SnowCap adopts 2-3 family’s and donates everything from their wishlist in order to give them the best holiday possible. Since 2016, SnowCap has participated in many charitable causes benefiting The Home from the gift drive, to the Backpack Drive, and many more.

The Somerville Village Project

Most recently, SnowCap undertook a massive project to benefit the Somerville Village – a home created by the Home for Little Wanderers for disadvantaged young women. Somerville Village is a home created specifically to enable these young women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness to pursue a higher education by providing housing, therapeutic, emotional, and educational support. With a main focus in the home being on education, there was an immense need for a WIFI system that would never fail. SnowCap donated and implemented a state-of-the-art networking system upgrade. These improvements will ensure that the young women living in this home have access to the absolute best resources possible. Included in this state-of-the-art networking system are:

o APC Racks

o APC Power distribution units

o HPE Aruba switching

o Cisco Meraki wireless Access Points

o Implementation Services

Here at SnowCap, we are delighted to be involved in making a positive impact on the lives of these young women. It is a continued honor to be helping benefit their futures in any way that we can. We look forward to our ongoing support for The Home for Little Wanderers.

vSphere Support and Upgrades

VMware is ending support for vSphere 5.5 on September 18th, 2018. Extended support will be available, but at a cost. Based on surveys, over 60% of the systems in use are still running 5.5 or an earlier version. While it is important that systems running older versions be upgraded as soon as possible, it is not necessarily a simple process.

Last month at VMworld 2018 VMware announced vSphere 6.7 Update 1 which will be released to GA soon. As with any major release most consumers wait for the first Update or Service Pack to arrive before deploying to production. That day is drawing close which makes this a great time to tackle any upgrade tasks. I did a previous blog on the new features of 6.7 that you can read here and have outlined the Update 1 enhancements here.

vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Enhancements

Fully Functional HTML 5 Client

Finally! The HTML5 version of the vSphere Client is 100% functional and the Flash based Web Client is no longer needed. This update simplifies administration and provides additional security by removing the need to have Flash enabled.

vCenter Server Converge Tool

There have been several architectural changes wih 6.7. One is the ability to scale and use Enhanced Linked Mode with embedded Platform Services Controllers (PSC). There was no easy way to convert an existing infrastructure with an external PSC to the new architecture, until now! This new tool will allow the distributed architecture to be converged during the upgrade process.

Upgrade Path from vSphere 6.5 Update 2

Due to the fact that 6.5 U2 was released after 6.7 GA, there was no upgrade path available as Update 2 contained additional security enhancements not included with 6.7 GA. Now with 6.7 Update 1, a direct upgrade is possible.

Enhanced GPU Operations

Systems with Nvidia Grid now support live vMotion migrations. This is especially important for Horizon View customers and enterprises that utilize this technology for High Performance Computing without sacrificing the mobility that they have come to expect from vSphere!

Support for vSphere Platinum

vSphere Platinum is a new licensing model that bundles VMware AppDefense with ESXi. For anybody that needs the highest level of security, this introduces a set of tools and features to enable you to meet these requirements.

VMware Cloud on AWS

vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode

I touched on this in my last blog, but it is worth repeating this functionality which truly enables the promise of a seamless hybrid cloud. These features include enhanced cross vCenter migration, mixed vCenter versions, and per-VM EVC.

New Announcements

Also announced at VMworld 2018 were several enhancements for the AWS offering. These include increased options for compute and storage, increased availability of NSX security features, a new three host minimum cluster size, and 50% reduction in cost! Obviously, this has the potential of making this a much more attractive offering for anyone looking to move workloads or DR to the cloud while still maintaining the flexibility of migrating these seamlessly.

vSphere Upgrade Readiness Check

As I stated at the beginning of this blog, this a fantastic time to upgrade those old, out of support vSphere versions, but it is not always easy. SnowCap Technologies can work with you to determine the readiness status of your infrastructure including the following components.

At the end of the check you’ll receive a comprehensive overview of the hardware/software improvements that need to be made, as well as the services estimate for completing the upgrades on your behalf. Best of all, this check requires a low level of effort from you and costs nothing.

Please reach out to your Account Representative or fill out our contact form so we can perform this review! Soon you can be taking advantage of these new features with the comfort of knowing that you are fully supported.